On Wednesday, April 17, 2024, Word for Word, Southern New Hampshire University’s (SNHU) online literary series, proudly welcomed award-winning author Kelly Link.
Link is the bestselling author of the novel “The Book of Love” and the collections “Stranger Things Happen,” “Magic for Beginners,” “Pretty Monsters,” “Get in Trouble” and “White Cat, Black Dog.” Her short stories have been published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, The Best American Short Stories and Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards. She was a 2018 MacArthur Fellow and has received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.
Link and her partner Gavin J. Grant have co-edited a number of anthologies, including multiple volumes of “The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror” and, for young adults, “Steampunk!” and “Monstrous Affections.” She is the co-founder of Small Beer Press and co-edits the occasional zine Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet. She is the owner of Book Moon, an independent bookshop in Easthampton, Massachusetts.
Link was born in Miami, Florida. She currently lives with her family, dog and chickens in Northampton, Massachusetts.
After reading from her novel, “The Book of Love,” Link answered questions from the audience and from moderators Jacob Powers and Paul Witcover. The following is an edited transcript of that Q&A.
W4W: It’s amazing to listen to that first chapter after having read the whole book, because so much is seeded and present but not yet unfolded. How long did it take you to get that chapter to where you wanted it to be?
KL: A friend of mine, the writer Holly Black, a long time ago said that the first page and the first chapter of a book makes a promise as to what a book is going to be about thematically, in terms of what language is going to do, the kind of genres that a book is going to draw from. She said that years ago, and I really have been thinking about it ever since. There’s a lot of stuff in that first chapter, groupings of words I wanted to reverberate in the back of somebody’s head until those aspects of the book come into prominence.
W4W: Does that come first, that attentiveness to language, and then the rest of the book grows out of it? Or do you have the shape of the book to start with, and then draw the right language to use from that?
KL: I think it’s somewhere in the middle. I almost always have something about the ending. I often begin with an ending. And then the part of actually figuring out how to make a book work is figuring out the characters who will be there at that ending and finding the kind of tone or mood that the book is going to be operating in and figuring out the characters, figuring out the tone and the language of the book as those two things happen in concert.
But I don’t feel that I have a handle on characters until I know what the sound of the language is and a little bit about the pacing. Of course, pacing changes as you go, but I mean what the default pacing is going to feel like and what the preoccupations of the book are. I have to have a pretty clear sense of that in order to get past the first couple of pages. Even if later on I end up making lots of changes, I need some solid ground to start with.
W4W: And plot grows out of that?
KL: Plot is this negotiation between the thing that I want to do at the end and who the characters are and then the things that I love best about the genres that I’m going to be drawing from. But some of it is just thinking, “What are the genres that I’m going to be drawing from? And what are the things that I most enjoy about those genres? What are the things that the genres accommodate in terms of storytelling or surprise?” And then the plot is really negotiating the maze of all the fun stuff that certain genres allow you to do, taking the characters toward them and then out of them.
W4W: “The Book of Love” is your first novel. Can you talk about the differences between writing a novel and writing short stories? Did anything surprise you along the way?
KL: I can talk about the things that felt similar and then the things that felt just—where I felt like a novice, I guess. I still started at the ending. And for a very long time, as I worked, I would revise from the beginning to the place that I’d left off, just like I do with stories. The first big surprise was that at a certain point I couldn’t do that anymore. Because in order to keep on going, I had to stop revising the first 150 pages. I had to put that aside and begin to just slog forward.
Another big surprise was that when I got to the end, I thought I would feel like I had done something different. Not like I’d done something extraordinary, but different. And I was kind of horrified when I got to the end, because the feeling was very recognizable.
W4W: What was the feeling?
KL: Like I’d done the best that I could. I felt like I, to the best of my ability, did some things that I set out to do. But I’m not sure that it felt any different to me than writing a short story, which was actually kind of a relief. I thought, “What happens if I finish the novel and it doesn’t feel alive in the way that I need it to feel alive?”
But I thought I would have a bigger feeling when I finished. Instead, I just felt like I’d spent a lot of time. I spent eight years working on something, and the longest it’s ever taken me to write a short story is about two and a half years. So I wanted a different feeling from it. Honestly, I’d been working on the book for so long that when I finished it, mostly what I felt was exhausted.
The work of making something feel as if it has forward momentum—not that it’s going to work for every single reader, but to make it work to a certain degree for myself—was a really cool new problem to solve. The fact that I got to figure out how to do that with this novel was really exciting to me.
W4W: In your recent collection, “White Cat, Black Dog,” which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, I noticed that a lot of the stories feature the Rule of Three. For example, in ‘The White Cat’s Divorce,’ there are three tasks, and in ‘Prince Hat Underground,’ there are three guides. Is the Rule of Three a common theme in your writing?
KL: It’s different to work in realistic fiction, where everything is very grounded in the real world, no matter how surprising it is, and to work in any kind of fiction that’s drawing from fantasy. There’s something that feels more patterned about certain kinds of storytelling.
All people are storytellers. We tell ourselves stories about our friends. We try and dissect patterns that happen to us in real life. We are often on the lookout for things that could be coincidental but that we make into a story frame. If something happens once, it may be striking, but there isn’t a pattern. Even two times feels more like just a coincidence. But when there is a pattern of three, it begins to feel like there’s something more there. There’s story there.
The Rule of Three comes from fairy tales; you see that pattern a lot there. But even if readers have moved away from fairy tales, it’s still something they engage with. Fairy tale language and fairy tale patterns of storytelling are so ingrained in readers and writers that by introducing something of the language of a fairy tale or something of the structure of a fairy tale, even if we are working in a realistic mode, we bring the reader into a space where stories are beginning to intersect with other stories. So they are going to be pulling from their experience of fairy tales.
If I say in a story, “once upon a time,” that pulls down all the fairy tales that we remember. If I say, “red as blood,” again, that means people are paying more attention in a story to other kinds of language. And there’s a sense that something is going on, something that extends beyond just simply being descriptive.
W4W: How do you fold the process of fairy tale writing, something so old, into something new while still honoring it, and then making that new piece feel new and weird and absurd and not like a fairy tale or something that we’ve heard over and over again?
KL: I often encourage people to make lists of all the things they like in stories, whether those are dynamics between characters, certain kinds of settings, certain kinds of plot twists, genres that they like, in part as a reminder—because writing can be such a terrible process—a reminder that there are things that you love about it that you can put in your own work and as a vibe check to see if you are allowing yourself to use the things that you love as a reader in your own writing. This is something I do myself.
With “White Cat, Black Dog,” every story intersects in some way with a specific fairy tale. And when I was writing those stories, I would think, “Well, what are the things I love about this fairy tale? What does it seem to be saying about the world or about how power works?” Because fairy tales are often about power. And I would think, “What are some congruences with the way that the real world works? And what are the things that now feel funny or old-fashioned that I can make feel funny and contemporary?”
I wrote ‘White Cat’s Divorce’ in part because my friend Holly Black had written a series of young adult novels that drew on the fairy tale ‘The White Cat.’ When she would do events for those books, she would retell the original fairy tale. That’s when I realized what a funny story it is. It is a story about a prince who is sent out into the world to perform all these different tasks. And the first time he is sent out, he stumbles into this kingdom of talking cats where he drinks, parties, goes hunting with and just hangs out with cats. And then he goes back for the second quest. He goes back for the third time, and he becomes very clear that he is a guy who probably does not want his father’s throne, which is the thing that he and his brothers are competing for. What he wants instead is to party with a bunch of talking cats.
And so I was thinking about a story that would draw on that. I was really struck by the poignancy of it, that you send a young person out into the world and ask them to do all these tasks. But who among us would not rather just party with some talking cats for a while and retreat from the world?
W4W: In your recent New Yorker interview, you say, ”I hate the mouthfeel of my own prose. I hate how inadequate I feel to the task of writing. I hate my relationship with writing.” Yet here you’ve published dozens of stories, and now a novel of over 600 pages!
KL: I think it’s a useful thing, if anyone is going to try and cultivate a life as a writer, to develop a certain degree of stubbornness, to be as stubborn as possible. I have that in the first place with my own work. I think that sense of sitting with a first draft and thinking, “This is terrible, this is not what I want it to be,” is going to be familiar to everybody.
The question is, are you able to sit with that feeling long enough to keep on going and to get the work that you’re doing into a different space? Because I do then love the period when I’m revising, when I’m making something better. There are occasions when I am able to write very quickly. It feels like a gift. I think allowing yourself to occasionally feel antagonistic toward the kind of work that you do is OK, but I think that has to go with an ability or with a sense that you are still interested in that work. Because I think it’s better to hate writing but to still be interested in how it works and what genres do and what you might be capable of doing with language or with characters or with structure. To hate the work that entails but to remain in a place where you still want to be investigating it is maybe healthy.
Again, I’m going to quote the extremely smart Holly Black, who says that there’s a very cold, very small lake near us that people swim in, and it’s stream fed. So it is freezing. And she said that she realized at a certain point, watching somebody get in and out because it was too cold for them to stay in while she was in the water and just floating there, she thought that that felt in some ways like the relationship writers who managed to keep going have with their writing. That every time that you sit down to do some writing, there may be a feeling of initial discomfort.
The pond is too cold. Work is too hard. But you sit with that feeling long enough, and you adjust. And in fact, the water begins to feel pleasant. Work begins to feel like something you can sit with. That feels true to me as well. If I can just sit with that discomfort for long enough, I can dismiss it and move on somewhere else.
As writers, we all have to learn to be tough critics toward our own work. The writer Kate Wilhelm, who founded a workshop called Clarion, said that’s inevitable. You are going to be a harsh critic of your own work, but you also have to acknowledge to yourself when you are doing work that you love, when you are excited by the things that you’re doing. And when that’s true, you say to yourself, “Yes, this is good. I would like more of this.” This is the kind of work that I want to be doing and thinking about.
Kate Wilhelm says at the back of your brain is something that she calls your silent partner—the writer’s silent partner. When you say, “This is good, I want more of this,” the silent partner will produce more. But if all you’re able to say to yourself is “This is not good, this sentence is no good, this chapter is no good,” whatever, then that silent partner begins to shut off the flow because it thinks you’re not liking it. So it feels it should stop providing it. As well as being honest about things that need work, you have to acknowledge to yourself when you’re doing work that feels right or that feels good.
W4W: “The Book of Love” is a book that’s made up of other books. Every chapter is called ‘The Book of This,’ ‘The Book of That.’ In your New Yorker interview, you said, “I think a lot about narrative structures and about the kinds of assumptions we make about what a short story should do.” How does this quote apply to what you were doing with “The Book of Love” in terms of narrative structure?
KL: I think with “The Book of Love,” and because I had not written a novel before, a lot of my goals were just to do the kinds of things that a novel can do pleasurably or do to provide surprise or pleasure, but also the things that a novel can do that a short story can’t accommodate.
W4W: Can you give us some examples?
KL: Lots of voices. I could write a short story that was maybe a choral short story, but it would not have the same effect as writing a novel where I had a bunch of major characters who got points of view as well as a lot of secondary characters who also had their own storyline. I knew I wanted to do that, and I picked this structure—’The Book of Susannah,’ ‘The Book of Laura,’ and so on—in part because I didn’t want somebody to say, well, Susannah is obviously the main character, or Laura, her sister, is the main character or Mo is the main character. I wanted everybody in the book to feel as if they were central to their own story.
W4W: I wanted to ask a little bit about your writing process and especially about communal writing, which is something that a lot of our students do. They’ll get together over Zoom for writing sprints or a longer session of silent writing and then come together and have conversations afterward. Do you have experience with communal writing?
KL: Yes, though the pandemic has really changed all that. My husband has long COVID, so it’s much more complicated for me to meet other writers on retreat or even to work in larger groups. But for over a decade, close to 20 years, I met up probably five times a week when feasible with two local writers, Holly Black and Cassandra Clare. We often went on retreats with other writers, many of whom are young adult writers: Maureen Johnson, Leigh Bardugo, other people. We would often work all at the same table, then talk about what we were working on, then go back to more work. We would have other people at the table read our work.
Before that, I met up with writers in Brooklyn. I would sometimes go out to California and write with writers out there. I’ve never been somebody who’s great about writing on my own. I can always come up with any other activity. There’s so much in life that needs to be done. But when I’m with other writers, I am able to feel that writing is a thing that we’re all doing. And therefore I can spend hours working. I can work until 3 o’clock in the morning if other people are there at the table with me.
That’s obviously not true for everybody. I know writers who need quiet, or they need to be alone. But I know lots of people who meet up with each other online. They share a screen and work together. I think part of the process of making a writing life for yourself is figuring out the tricks that will enable you to get work done on a regular basis.
W4W: A lot of our students here focus on the speculative, high fantasy, things like that. But they’re also in workshops with literary fiction writers. They’re in classes with horror writers and romance writers and everything else. So when they’re workshopping a piece, they might not be being workshopped by their ideal audience. What advice would you have for all of our guests who might be in a workshop where they’re receiving feedback from people who might not be their ideal audience?
KL: When you are in a workshop where you are working with people who are interested in different kinds of genres, different kinds of possibilities, you have this extraordinary gift, which is that you have an opportunity to talk about what excites you, about the possibilities that different genres offer. And it’s not that literary fiction doesn’t fall into different genres as well. It too is drawing on certain kinds of traditions of storytelling, on a certain grouping of writers, let’s say. And I think it is useful to talk a great deal about why you are drawn to tell stories that are utilizing certain genres, where the excitement in those genres comes from, what are the reasons that readers are drawn to them, and what are the things that readers hope and expect that you’re going to do when you’re working in those spaces.
One thing I often have students do is make a list of the things in a mystery, say, that you feel are essential, the things that, if you removed them, you would no longer be reading a mystery. Same for romance. Science fiction can be a little looser. But what are the things that you expect to see in high fantasy? And then what are the things that may be present but are not essential to that genre?
There’s a writer, Ali Carter, who talks about it like a recipe. When you’re making cookies or a cake, there are certain ingredients that you’re always going to have to have. Or you’re going to have to substitute something that will take their place. And then there are ingredients that are super fun. And they may be present, but you don’t have to have them.
I think it is a useful thing to do, to have some roundhouse discussions. What are the genres that I’m drawing from? Even if I’m writing literary fiction, what is the shape? What do I think of as the shape of a certain kind of an experimental story or of a coming-of-age story or a story of a crisis point in someone’s life? How does a genre story in that same space work? What happens if you mesh the two?
One of the ways I thought about fantasy and ghost stories and zombie stories when I was writing my first two collections was, “How do I make this appealing to somebody who thinks ‘But I don’t like ghost stories’ or ‘I don’t like zombie stories’? What are the things I’m going to do in this story that they’ll think, ‘Well, I don’t like this kind of story, but I guess I’ll keep on reading. Because it’s funny, or because something interesting is happening here.’”
That’s a great discussion as well. Even if somebody does not like the genre that you’re operating in, what are the things they might like that you could do in addition to the stuff that you want to do in that genre space?
W4W: With workshops in general, what are your thoughts on the gag rule or the cone of silence? Is it appropriate? Is there room to say, “Here’s my story, but let me give you a little context.” Do you see any issues with that?
KL: My favorite method is probably still the Milford method, which is that the writer is silent. Everybody in the critique circle has two or three minutes. The instructor goes last. And then the person who has written the story asks some questions or describes some stuff they are hoping for. And then there’s roundtable. The thing that seems most worth preserving in this model is that every person in the workshop has a chance to say something of interest. I think sometimes in a looser format, certain voices dominate more than others. And that can break down along lines of race, gender, class, all of that stuff.
I’ve been talking with a friend, Nalo Hopkinson, who has been trying out some of the methods in Matthew Salesses’s book [“Craft in the Real World”] and some of her own. One of those is the instructor or another student interviewing the student before the workshop. “What was important to you in this story? Can you talk about the process of writing it? What are the things that most excite you about writing?” And then having a roundtable from that point on. Or maybe the writer themself asks the questions or directs it. But that puts a lot of burden on the writer.
We have an idea that the workshop is valuable to the person hearing the critiques. But I think the thing that is actually useful is how everybody sitting in that circle is being made to articulate their ideas about what stories can potentially do and the places they see where somebody could dig in a little bit deeper or where something might be revised, and all of that is telling them something about their own work. It’s telling them about their own anxieties or frustrations or their own feelings or reservations about things that they maybe are struggling with in their own work. I think that’s very useful. But also during that roundtable, everybody is hearing what other people say. It’s not just the writer whose work is being critiqued who is hearing a bell go off, a bell ringing when something feels true to them.
W4W: So it’s not just helping out the writer. It’s figuring out your own stuff along the way as well.
KL: Exactly, yeah.
W4W: Do you have any favorite specific writing exercises for improving specific creative writing skills?
KL: My favorite writing exercise is asking people to write as many first sentences as quickly as they can in the span of about a half hour. Just writing sentences with no idea what comes next. That really opens up a lot of stuff.
The other, as I’ve mentioned, is making a list of things that you love in writing or in novels and stories so that you can draw on it. And the last thing, that I did for a long time, is I would type out a page or two of writers whose work I was interested in but whom I did not write like before I sat down to do my own work so that I would have limbered up my fingers in terms of I would feel that I had been putting words down on the page, and then it was easier to do my own work.
W4W: That probably gives you some sort of insight that you might not otherwise have, a tactile insight into the flow of the prose.
KL: Exactly.
W4W: Lists are such an important part of your own fiction. You include lists in your stories. So they are more than just exercises.
KL: We’re not just storytelling creatures. We are list-making creatures. I am constantly making lists, leaving them around the house when I’m supposed to be bringing them with me. But then you find them later. Sometimes I find a list years later, and that list is full of story. I’m like, ”What was I doing? Why was I interested in these things? What does this cryptic note mean?”
When I write, I often keep a sheet of paper so that I can write down things that occur to me that I know I want to have happen later on. So I’m typing on my laptop, but I’m also writing cryptic notes to myself by hand.
W4W: Thank you for sharing all this wisdom, Kelly. It’s been very generous of you!
KL: Well, I really enjoyed this. It was great to talk to you all. Thank you all for the questions. I hope that everybody’s writing is going really well!
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